In his excellent post yesterday, Chris Sims went over the process to become a freelancer for D&D Insider. In the comments, I chimed in about not being boring while others clamoured for a pitch example. I thought that my Friday Chat feature would be a perfect occasion to share one of my recent pitches that happened to fit with Wizards’ submission requirements (although it is about 150 words too long) and, I like to believe, is anything but boring.
In fact, as Chris put it, it was likely rejected not because it was a bad idea, but probably because it was a bit too out there for D&D Insider‘s scope. While I realize that I’m not that credible a source since I’ve yet to actually publish an adventure (Yo, Goodman Games! Anytime now!), I’m convinced that people will appreciate the example/template.
Oh and if anyone would like to help/back me to do this adventure, I’m totally up for it.
So with no further ado, I give you…
Your Castle is in another Princess
Elevator Pitch: The PCs are on their way to meet the monarch of a peaceful land when they discover the half-buried body of a gigantic elemental noble where the king’s castle should be. As the colossal primordial pulls itself out of the ground and starts to walk away, the PCs realize that the castle is within the creature, and their only chance to recover it is to go inside its body. While inside, they must break several rituals that hold the castle in the creature’s chest before it can walk to a nearby ley-line and return to the Elemental Chaos.
Estimated Word count: 9000-10000 words
Adventure Synopsis: While answering a royal summons by the monarch of the region’s most stable kingdom, the PCs find a half-buried gigantic statue of a female humanoid where the castle should be. As they investigate this phenomenon, the statue animates, digs itself out of the ground and slowly walks away, leaving no traces of the castle behind.
After a short investigation, the party finds that saving the monarch and the castle will require climbing on the walking colossus, and entering its body. They’ll explore a strange dungeon made of chaos-touched caverns and ruined buildings now embedded into the primordial. They’ll eventually find the castle, which functions as the Primordial’s heart.
Through their exploration and conflicts, the PCs piece together the story of the dying Primordial and the obsessed work of a genasi geomancer attempting to save her. Finally, they must defeat the geomancer and her guardians in the heart/castle in order to interrupt the rituals that animate the slumbering Primordial and save the castle before it transports back to the Elemental Chaos.
An adventure for Mid to High Paragon level PCs.
Villain: Nala-Shan is a female earthsoul genasi geomancer whose dedication to Grak-shi-var, the primordial known as “The Sleeping Princess,” borders on psychotic obsession. The decaying illness that is slowly destroying her slumbering mistress has dominated her thoughts for the last 50 years and she lets nothing get in the way of her plans to save her.
Villain’s Goals: Using dread rituals stolen from Demon Lords, Nala-Shan transported the Sleeping Princess to the material world in order to place a castle (a place of power) called Stone Hearth Keep inside its body. The legendary castle brings stability and health to the surrounding lands and Nala-Shan hopes that it will save her liege lord.
Nala-Shan wants to return her mistress’s body to the Elemental Chaos by animating it and moving it to a nearby ley-line crossing. From there, Nala-Shan will open a portal to transport her mistress back home. Once arrived, she’ll complete the ritual to prevent the castle from returning to its original location.
Adventure Locales: The adventure starts in the capital of small kingdom. Adventurers will be able to research the history of the castle and the possible identity of the primordial in the town’s archives.
The exterior of the primordial, while easily climbable, will present an interesting combat challenge against the geomancer’s servants. The interior of the primordial will be a vertical dungeon made up of Elemental-themed areas and pieces of buildings that surrounded the castle. Finally, the castle will house Nala-Shan and her last guardians protecting the rituals that animates the primordial and keeps the castle within it.
Heroes’ Objectives: Discover where the castle is and how to return it by breaking the rituals that binds it in the princess’s body.
Your turn now…
Note that this template is actually based on the original D&D insider submission requirements that were recently loosened to “give us a title, an idea and a solid pitch, no more than 500 words”. The elevator pitch is something I added to make the proposal pop in the 1st paragraph, priming the reader’s interest for the rest.
Do note that this makes using the template create rather wordy submissions, which may play against you. Be careful here.
Also, as I said yesterday, have people read your proposal (no, not me, I don’t have the time, ask your friends) and ask them for a honest assessment about the quality of its writing and the interest it generates. I think that the two greatest killers of submission is badly written queries and snore-inducing premises.
By badly written I mean spelling, punctuation, grammar and syntax issues. If you can’t properly build a 500 words text, forget about ever getting picked to tackle a 5000+ article/adventure. Get a proofreader to give you a solid reality check (or a good editor, like I did, he he he).
By boring I mean proposing an article idea about something too close to what already exists out there. This is no time to be conservative. Go for far out fluff and mechanics that you are certain you can pull off and that will push the design space of the game a bit more. Yet, at the same time, maintain your sales pitch tight enough that people can be sold on your idea in one paragraph or less. If you need 300 words of context for your ideas, you lost high-level people like me, the type that are often in charge of the sludge piles.
So there you have it. My take on freelancing and my (failed) example. Next time it will work, I’m sure.
What about you? What strategies would you take to get published in D&D Insider, Kobold Quarterly, White Wolf, Paizo or elsewhere?
Any publishers out there looking for talent ? Feel free to make a pitch to our readers/would be designers/me (paying gigs only please).
Sound off!
My strategy would probably be to use an idea I’d like to play and try to convey what excites me about it as a potential player. So I guess it’d come out much like yours – too outlandish!
I really like your idea, and I hope you’re keeping these things on file to publish somehow, sometime!
.-= Wyatt´s last blog ..RELEASE: NAA D6 V1.4 =-.
Just to add a note, Phil looked over one of my D&D Insider proposals and had some very simple but great advice I figure I should share here. The draft of my proposal that I sent to Phil was full of information but it lacked any kind of energy behind it, it didn’t feel or sound like I was excited to write it. After a few revisions I ended up with a proposal that was a lot more eye-catching and full of excitement. I wish I could say that led to it being published, but it didn’t, however in the end I’m much happier with the proposal that I sent (and I know it had more of a chance than the original) so thanks Phil for helping out with that!
Also you know I’ve loved this Castle-Princess idea from the start, so I hope it gets published somewhere eventually!
@Wyatt: There’s a market for outlandish and crazy. I mean I played both ‘Alice in Wonderland’ adventures that grandaddy Gary wrote way back when and loved them. (I also loved Paranoia). So let’s keep our crazy ideas drawer nearby. I still think something like “Asylum Press” or “Dungeon Asylum Press” should be considered as an imprint.
@Bartoneus: Hey man, thanks for the Kudos. It’s a trick I’ve been sharing for a long time. Hell, when my wife prepared for her first job interview, I told her that she needed to sell how completely awesome being a Speech Language Pathologist was and she aced it perfectly!
I was also told by Jim Wyatt that rejection is part of the D&D freelance experience, that he got turned down many times by Dungeon and Dragon magazines before he got his foot in. That’s a ‘think about it”
I want to say, I love this idea. Literally, last week, I had a fleeting thought of how to convert a Shadow of the Colossus style combat into a DnD session. Having to climb and explore an enormous moving creature seemed like some kind of awesome, so I mentally filed it for later exploration. Lo and behold, here is something similar enough to really pique my interest.
The second thing I want to say is that I’ve been contemplating opening up the submissions section of Level 30 Yinzer. I feel like we’re off to a great start publicity and marketing-wise, but we need content beyond the blog. There are questions of timing involved here (as we’ve set an actual launch date of May 15th for our content), but I would love to solicit your pitch for our company.
Of course, there’s more to it than just that, but if you’re interested in exploring this option, shoot me an e-mail.
.-= Jenny Snyder´s last blog ..Wednesday dev snapshot: Encounter 3 of the Riverton Delves =-.
@Jenny: Way back when, I posted something exactly about that (digs deep in archive). Ah here it is:
https://critical-hits.com//2007/09/20/mining-tropes-for-rpg-nuggets-running-on-the-edge/
(Very early ChattyDM stuff, be gentle)
The pitch I made built on ideas put forth in that post. I’m glad you like it.
Thanks for the invite. At the time, I’m building my 2010-2011 portfolio and will look back in your outfit once you actually launch. From May onwards I’ll do a work/benefit/fun analysis of all my projects and I’ll pick a few to work on until Gen Con. Awe us with your launch and I’ll be happy to explore how we could collaborate in the future.
That also goes for all publishers, from across the game spectrum. I am busy, but I want to work on the best possible project with the best outfit and the list isn’t closed.
But there’s a lot more would be freelancers here. Come on guys and girls, delurk and show us your best forum posts. ¨People like Jenny are watching.
Don’t be overprotective of your ideas, they are worthless if they sit in your head and you do nothing about them.
I have found conventions to be enormously helpful. I have had 3 articles published in Paizo-era Dragon, and the first 2 were directly due to a GenCon seminar.
The Paizo folks were talking about their plans for the first Campaign Classics issue. They said they had people lined up for most of the old settings, but in an offhand joke asked if anyone remembered Hollow World. Well, as soon as I got home, I dug out the old boxes, and looked over them until I had a handful of article ideas to pitch. One was accepted, but deemed too long, so I wrote half of it. Then when they were doing the Pirates, Ninjas, and Dinosuars theme, they recalled that my other half of the article had a dinosaur theme and away we went!
Other publications (from KQ to the modron article in Paizo-Dragon, to working with othe companies back in the 3.x days), it was largely just query and query often. Come up with as many interesting ideas as you can, send the best 25% in as queries but save the rest because someday you might have a slightly different spin on them. But constantly generate ideas, filter out the weaker ones, and query then re-query.
I know some companies have a policy on the maximum number of queries to send at a time, but the general policy of many freelancers is for every rejection, send out 3 or 4 new queries. Generally, the idea of queries as pre4e wizard spells is a good one – fire and forget. Once a query is sent, don’t pine away waiting for a response, immediately start work on more ideas.
Made me think of this recent Commissioned comic: http://www.commissionedcomic.com/?p=2242
Neat idea, though I can see how it might be a bit outside what Wizards would want to publish.
As a DM, I appreciate both sides, the energy and having enough info to run the game without running to 80 different source books. And while I’ve never been in a position to accept/reject adventure proposals, I’ve been on lots of search committees, and all the technical skills in the world don’t necessarily mean anything when you actually have to work with people. I think it is similar here. You can have the greatest concept in the world, but if it doesn’t come across to the audience, forget it.
I love this post because it does an excellent job of showing the three most important parts of a submission as an example, not just instructions.
1) layout, concise ideas
2) grammar, spelling, readability
3) something I want to play… like today.
The #3 reason makes you a bad person, because it doesn’t actually exist. You tease! Seriously though, this is a great post to emulate in form and scope.
One of the most important parts of your submission is that first paragraph – don’t worry about crunch or tying everything together, instead try to capture the reader’s imagination. Use a lot of imagery, mystique, and duplicitous plots; it’s the first thing the editor is going to see, you have to suck them in immediately.
Now, to take advantage of Chatty’s invitation! Go look at my website: http://www.readyanaction.com and read my stuff! For now I’ve been posting a large pull-them-in encounter each week, but I’ll be putting up a few other things (new class, status stickers) in the near future.
Good luck to all freelancers, don’t get discouraged – and keep sending in idea after idea; persistence is important!
@Ken: I scored all my RPG freelance projects through actual contact with the publishers. I met Wolfgang Baur (and interacted with him) a few times, same thing with Harley Stroh (Goodman Games) and Chris Sims (who recognized me before I did at Gen Con 2008, I’m sorry to say, I knew I should have taken my Rules Compendium with me).
Having a face to put on the submission helps a lot. That’s why I encourage would be freelancers to launch blogs, get a certain level of renown (100+ RSS followers) and then hit the conventions for some greet and meet.
@Dean: Perfect comic for the idea I was going for.
Hey, did you just say my idea sucked? 🙂 Nah, I get what you mean. Thanks for the insights. My lessons from the last rounds of submissions is to make simpler (not more tame or boring) proposal that the reviewers can see themselves DMing from reading the proposal, not worry about the technical challenges of pulling it off.
@corwin: Ahhh, Schucks man thanks for the Kudos. Makes it all worthwhile. I’m not abandoning this idea but would likely do it for an ‘Advanced’ product line for DMS and players wanting to push the 4e experience past the RAW experience. Like HD D&D 4e
🙂
By the way, I forgot to give kudos to Dave: The Game who edited that submission before I sent it out. If you have friends that can do that for you (Editing and proofreading), do so! Heaven knows I need it.
@Chatty- Absolutely not with the suckage! My last paragraph was *meant* to indicate the importance of being able to relate your cool idea/concept/environment/story to others. Yours comes across well, which is one of your strengths, IMO. So many people have great ideas, but can’t convey them well. Which is why I don’t have a gaming blog.
Is the adventure you pitched here available? I’d totally run it….
@chattyd “wow me with your launch” there’s some terrifying words to hear. Pressure’s on, I guess! 😉
.-= Jenny Snyder´s last blog ..Wednesday dev snapshot: Encounter 3 of the Riverton Delves =-.
I’ll say it again and then someone will respond. Critical Hits should (web) publish adventures. What, you need royalty checks to validate your adventures? D&D is about the community, not the commercial enterprise. And, presto, I’m looking at a community right now.
Hi Chatty. I agree wholeheartedly with what Froggy says – Self publish. You’ve poured a lot of effort into your proposal, you knew where you would take it if it were approved. If it is too out of scope for Insider I say carry the momentum on self-publish and see what happens.
@Jenny: No pressure. If you are confident in the quality and interest your product will generate, I say you go full ahead without fear. This, above and beyond marketing and publicity buzz will make or kill your venture. Best of luck!
@Robert: Sadly no. Actually, you don’t usually send submissions of adventures you have already written. Otherwise you are investing a lot of work for a very high rejection rate.
@Foggy and kiems and all other “I’d buy it”: Thanks! I know many are patiently waiting for me to decide to go at it. After having worked on the One Page Dungeon Codex, I’m just starting to see just how much work AND expense is required to produce a product that will shine through this already overloaded market.
I could choose to do it basement style, like the Gygax/Blumes did in the 80’s and target my readership first with quaint but well written 4e adventures. However, current web marketing theory says that 2% of your readership will buy whatever you launch. Where I stand today, that 2% represents about 50 people. Thus, I gotta go for something a little more elaborate to at least hit 10X more so I can hope to at least recuperate my costs.
With the end of seminar season just around the corner, I will build a list of projects and will let you know my plans.
Thanks so much for your support!
.-= ChattyDM´s last blog ..Friday Chat: Don’t be boring! A Real D&D Insider Pitch =-.
As a sometimes curator of the KQ slush pile and an editor there, Chatty, I just wanted to clarify something. Your blog had no direct bearing on your article being published with KQ on my end.
Perhaps the other editors would disagree – I can’t speak for them – but I can say that “blogger renown” has no bearing on article acceptance rates at KQ to the best of my knowledge. The RPG blogosphere is something I passively follow when I have time, but blog writing has no real relationship to article writing.
I like reading blogs. I blog too! But I’ve also worked in print before, and can say that the type of writing blogging encourages is often detrimental to getting published in a non-blog setting for stylistic reasons. Though both involve writing, the tone and conventions of blogging are actually way, way different.
That’s not to say that prospective writers shouldn’t be blogging – by all means, do so! I’ll read if I like it! – but that being a popular blogger won’t have any real bearing on being a successful freelancer with a publication like ours.
That being said, I think blogging would be a great benefit for an individual who is self-publishing a .pdf or something of the sort where the author’s personality is a huge part of the product being sold – but in a magazine, you aren’t selling your own personality or Internet presence. You’re selling your ideas, and most people won’t even look at the by-line of your piece in print before reading it. Preferential treatment of known names, in cases like that (barring an Ed Greenwood or someone else who actually does move significant numbers of books and magazines since he’s Ed freaking Greenwood) does a disservice to the writer and, more importantly, the reader.
So yeah, your KQ article was accepted because it was good, at least on my end. That you were a blogger who had some degree of popularity didn’t enter into the equation of whether I wanted to accept the piece. The design space you worked in was all that mattered to me. If anything, I was a bit hesitant before reading the thing because, since I read your blog, I was concerned you’d be writing in blog mode rather than in “print mode.” I was happily surprised to see that you made the transition.
If other of our freelancers blog, I don’t know about it. So I think that should help clarify whether blogging opens the door for people on my end at KQ – again, Wolfgang and Scott might have different opinions on this. I’m just one of several editors. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they are like me – we all love the magazine, and we care more about the integrity of the publication we sell in terms of content rather than the resumes of our contributors.
Vis a vis your sample pitch, I’d say this. Don’t go over word limit, no matter what. If a writer can’t stay within word limit on a sample, then that’s a huge red flag to editors that a writer can’t stick to word count on a paying piece in the finished product. No matter how good a pitch or piece is, it won’t be published if there isn’t enough physical space in the book/magazine to fit it – and excising words from an article for space reasons requires a delicate hand.
I speak from personal experience as both a writer and an editor. My last piece published in KQ got cut further for space reasons (and I don’t edit things I write because that way lies madness), and it definitely hurt my ego (and, I think, the finished product). But that’s no one’s fault – the submission stuck to word count, but at the last minute space constraints (I’m assuming) reared their ugly heads and trimming was required. Them’s the breaks. Newspapers have to do that all the time, too. It’s just a fact of writing.
As an editor, I’ve been guilty of refusing to read a submission that did not meet my publication’s requirements before – and going over word count in a digital file is a sure-fire way to get the document closed immediately and rejected without reading it. So too is any deviation from our specifications. Not every editor does this, of course – but I do, because I think showing off within the specifications of our submissions rubric is a huge part of getting a paying gig. It shows that you take our publication just as seriously as your own ideas – and shows a willingness to take direction, which is the best quality a freelancer can demonstrate to an editor like me.
Remember – your ideas are going to go in our magazine. They’ll be subjected to many individuals’ editing and feedback. You’re giving up a certain amount of author autonomy by even trying to get into a magazine, because you’re giving us permission to cut the piece as much or as little as necessary. Going over wordcount or deviating from the submission forms is the fastest way to get rejected outright.
Consider this: If your idea can’t sizzle in the space allotted, you’re either not pitching it to the best of your ability or it’s not a good idea for print in the format for which you’re pitching. Tightly focused and simple ideas are almost always a better magazine pitch than sprawling or expansive ideas – it’s easier to show off!
If you or anyone else are having trouble writing to word length, I strongly suggest learning AP Style – journalists’ standard – and writing in AP. As a style it forces you to write simply and concisely, eliminating needless words. A really healthy dose of AP could take Chatty’s longer piece and lose at least 100 words off the top, easy.
Take this all with a grain of salt, of course. I’m not the ur-Editor, who speaks for all editors. But I think the stuff I listed above is good advice: real common sense for the freelancer. Though other editors might disagree with the nature of the advice and how it impacts THEIR process, I think if you stick to the advice I laid out about writing and pitch scope it will help freelancers universally: because that stuff is the stuff that helps writing really pop in front of an editor.
.-= Neal Hebert´s last blog ..A Brief Summary of the Game So Far =-.
@Neal: Thanks so much for your insights. If you’ll allow a counter clarification, I didn’t want to imply that being a blogger helps being published. Believe you me, I recently realized, as you succinctly described, that it can play against you.
My KQ article had to be seriously edited by my friend Ben to depersonalize its conversational (and I also learned what passive vs active voice meant).
What writing the blog got me was finding a way to interact with Wolfgang in a different way than is usual in the industry (Conventions, being a patron, letters to the editor). It go me to deal with him on a more personal level for my articles queries.
I actually appreciate that there is no further impact/influence that the blog plays… because to be quite frank… my self-editing stinks. 🙂
As you say, a freelance needs to write for the Magazines/websites. They can’t expect to have the magazine be a gallery of the writer’s material. That I got… Ego pieces and complex ideas that the writer does not want to see touched by too many people need to be self published… with the disadvantages that comes with it.
It’s among the many lessons that I learned in the last year or so.
Thanks again for helping give an editor’s view on the discussion. It was very eye opening. It feeds KQ’s highly deserved reputation as a professional box. Looking forward to drop more articles on your desk. 🙂
I’ll say it again and then someone will respond. Critical Hits should (web) publish adventures. What, you need royalty checks to validate your adventures? D&D is about the community, not the commercial enterprise. And, presto, I’m looking at a community right now.
And honestly, I think something like AP Style is great for writers who write in their second language – at least, if that language is English – because it’s essentially a dictionary. You buy the AP Stylebook 2010, write your piece, then go through it word by word with the Stylebook to make sure you picked the correct word: it’s a style that directly controls word usage in addition to format to ensure absolute clarity of meaning and punctuation. It also demands internal consistency – and it allows you to write in approximately the same framework as many of a magazine’s other pieces.
Not every editor uses AP. But all of my favorite editors (outside of RPGs, at least) use a variation of it – and my editing style at KQ is a combination of AP and RPG standard (which is very loosely defined and largely consistent with whatever WOTC does).
You can get a quick essentials guide to AP at:
http://www.wwu.edu/depts/journalism/syllabi/207labmanual.htm
But I think investing in an AP Stylebook 2010 would probably reduce the amount of self-editing you need before sending off a submission (I, too, have gotten reads from Ben: he’s a saint and a good editor).
But yeah, that’s what I tell everyone who’s freelancing and wanting to improve their writing. It’s what I require my students at University to write in, too, and I’m not even a journalism teacher – and let me tell you, making 100 freshman Introduction to Theatre students learn AP is a chore. But by the end of it, they are all substantially better writers than they were when they enrolled in the class.
.-= Neal Hebert´s last blog ..A Brief Summary of the Game So Far =-.
Also, live by these rules:
http://www.wwu.edu/depts/journalism/syllabi/kilpatty207.htm
.-= Neal Hebert´s last blog ..A Brief Summary of the Game So Far =-.